Grave Diggers
by Darth Meanie
Summary: The rachni wars have hit a new phase. The krogan are coming. And the Grave Diggers are here to destroy every hellhole they dig. Rated T for mild gore.
1. Topside

Another rachni started charging at me, this time from the side. I shot the rachni on the left, and quickly flipped the barrel of my gun around into the head of the oncoming red insect.

"Good," I thought. "It won't be getting up anytime soon."

It seemed as though the battlefield was quiet for a second. Weapon discharge from my squadmates shouted past the rubble and corpses littered about, and the dense atmosphere shimmered from the glow of the speeding metal slugs and flying acid bombs. I shifted my weight towards the encampment, a dilapidated bunker from who knows what war, making sure there weren't any unexpected intruders, when I felt a stinger go through my back.

Cursed shields don't stop any of their damn attacks. Acid, poison, stingers just rip right through everything. I stretched and turned my 550 kilo body towards my assailant towering over him with my impressive 220 centimeters. A rachni soldier. Excellent. I was getting bored.

I pulled the stinger out of my dark red, heavy armor and shrugged, feeling the poison crepping through me, a hard throbbing pain in my veins. I let the regenerative abilities bestowed by natural selection upon my people after generations of war work their magic. Unfortunately, things tend to get worse before they get better, and my fingers began to shake from the neurotoxins. No way was I going to hit anything like that. I put away my assault rifle and pulled my shotgun out.

"No need for aim with this baby," I thought as i switched magazines to a set of high explosive rounds.

More rachni came at me, and more ate it as they ran headfirst stupidly into the grenade launcher the salarians had oh so generously provided. They kept running out of their tunnels, and we kept flushing them out. Hours passed; soldiers died; rachni died more. It takes alot of muscle to face down the krogan army.

My head was aching, and I was certain my brown face would have turned red by now from the poison. The toxins had definetely reached their climax now, even with a shotgun and explosive rounds my aim was degenerative. Those soldiers have a nasty posion in them. If I wasn't a soldier, I'd probably be dead, like the guy next to me. I have two nervous systems and I'm having trouble aiming, if I were a salarian I'd have been dead hours ago, even with medicine. There was no medicine for krogan though, just the morphine in the suits to keep us fighting until we die. To be honest, between the two, I'd go with the morphine every time. Let's the body do all the work.

Another push came, this time a seemingly organized one. Workers flinging acid in the back, soldiers rushing forward for the kill. A splatter of acid came right at me, and I ducked behing the rock I was using to brace my aim. I hoped for the worker to let off on the barrage, but it didn't, and the soldiers were getting nearer. They were going to flank me at point blank. I took my shotgun, switched magazines to some shredder rounds, and waited for them to come at me.

The first one appeared on my left, raising its brown ugly head in what I could only assume was a warcry. I blasted the head right off. Another one came from my right, and got close enough to try to impale. Try didn't count for much with shredders in it chest. Three came at once this time: two on the left, one on the right. I quickly blasted through the two on my side and dodged the tentacle coming from the one on the right and knocked it to the ground with the butt of my gun. I didn't see the fourth one though. As I saw a vicious insectoid tentacle coming from the corner of my eye towards me I forcefully rolled my body away with little success, lying on my back and still vulnerable. The rachni readjusted its trajectory, as did the barrel of my shotgun. The metal slugs ripped through the flesh at point blank range, leaving the corpse horribly mutilated.

I started to get up when I heard another hideous warcry, a brood warrior was attacking me, and I had no way to escape. Its arms flung themselves at my heart when I heard a deafening noise and watched as the alien's appendages fell lifelessly and harmlessly on my armor, its body only centimeters away with a metal slug having displaced its brains. I shifted over and shuffled towards the wreckage we had procured for the war when I saw a krogan decked in green armor with a silver sniper rifle pointed just past me shoot another rachni behind me, the last rachni of that push they had just made.

"Thats two you owe me Rank," he bragged, his green hide seemingly proud of itself for shooting down a rachni attacking a superior officer.

"I was never in any trouble back there Vyk," I said. "Besides," I paused, shifted, and took out three more rachni coming in from the rubble behind him.

"You were saying?"

"The rachni have tunnels on the other side of the base?" Vyk recovered, looking for tunnels past the insect corpses behind him at the rocky wilderness behind him.

"No you idiot. They flanked us, and if you hadn't had me here you'd be like that guy," I motioned my gun at a krogan corpse, eyes glazed over and sunken from the effects of the neurotoxin. Vyk shirked, and went back to sniping duty.

The pain in my body was finally dying down, but I made a mental note to avoid those stingers. No species I had ever heard of or ever encountered had the posion or the chemicals to paralyze or neutralize a krogan, but these rachni were pretty good at it. The galaxy is a bigger place than it was a century ago, when aliens were a lie and nuclear wasteland was all there was on the planet. I turned to Vyk one more time.

"Vyk, do a quick scan for me," I barked. "Are there any more rachni here, in the tunnels?"

Vyk got to work with his scanner. He wasn't even a century old, so he had no memories of when krogan fought with gunpowder and walked on land. He was taught by the salarians to use their technology. The boy was frail and hardly battle ready, like his other soldiers, but he could use the technology he couldn't, and that meant he was an irreplacable part of his platoon.

"No signs of non-krogan life," the boy observed. "The tunnels seem to be clean. Shall I call the salarians?"

"We're krogan, we don't leave jobs half-done," I replied. "We're going to see for ourselves."

There was fear in the boy's eyes. Good. I can exploit that. Maybe I can make a warrior out of him yet.


	2. Hellgate

I don't take rushing into any unsecured structure in the aftermath of a battle lightly, especially when its an underground labyrinth. First thing you learned, even back before we had any new guns or armor or weapons, was that you never go into an unsecured building in the middle of a firefight. Even so I'd seen good men get killed by camping soldiers with pistols aimed at head height at the doorway. So why am I doing it now?

We have the tactical advantage, there is no evidence that any bugs are still in those hellholes, and it will help my men get used to the idea of killing these things in hostile environments. Also, the last thing I want is to wake up in the middle of the night to find another group of them clawing at the bunker, stabbing sleeping or waking krogan not trained enough to fight at the moment of regaining conciousness. It makes sense to clean it out, but somewhere in the back of my head, crawling around in my soul is the drill instructor from decades past screaming into my ear to never do what I am about to do.

"Rank, did you say we were going into the tunnels?" Vyk interupted, almost quiveringly. Almost, krogan don't quiver.

"Is there a problem soldier?" I countered.

"Sir, I-"

"Should we leave an enemy base intact?"

"I didn't say-"

"Or perhaps we should allow them to attack us tonight, asleep on our cots."

"I understand, Rank," he confessed.

Rank. The soldiers came up with that nickname after they tired of calling me by my position. Lieutenant Colonel was a little much for battle conversation, and since they knew me only by my rank, that was what they started calling me. I suppose it is my own fault for never telling them my name, but I don't precisely know how I feel about it. Sometimes it is a harmless gesture of conversation, but sometime my men use it to isolate me because I have my rank, or to try to relate to me by giving me a friendly nickname. It cannot be understated that it has its usefulness in battle, and the respect it sometimes symbolizes is comforting. Here though is not battle but resentment.

"You will not call me Rank, Private," I said, embellishing the gap between our positions while drawing near enough to make him fear.

Vyk will be an excellent soldier once I teach him to ignore those fears. He's sharp, an excellent shot, and was taught by the Salarians to use all of their technology, that I don't and won't understand. Potential is probably the greatest curse he could have, because I'm going to come down on him until he becomes the best damn soldier I can make him.

I began to go down the line of soldiers I had still standing. There seemed to be nothing that some morphine and first aid couldn't fix. I came to one soldier though, acid dripping off of his paled armor and his pistol. Other soldiers smirked at his feeble attempts to restore his weaponry when I turned to him and smiled.

"Your magic didn't seem to help you, now did it, Grall?" I teased.

"I don't suppose you would care if it did," he answered.

Grall was a biotic. Apparantly there were a few accidents half a century ago when the salarians were teaching us to use spacecraft, and a year later krogan babies started throwing objects with their mind. While the military value of soldiers who can generate shields, throw enemies into the air, or even freeze them in place is obvious, it was just a little suspicious that the salarians were so crude in these early flight attempts. He was our only biotic, for they are pretty rare among krogan, but he seemed to think highly of himself for it, which only begged my and my mens' insults.

The announcement of the storming of the no man's land spread quickly among the remaining three dozen or so under my command. There was some silent dissent, but we krogan are proffessional soldiers, it is in our blood. It only took an hour to prepare the platoon to attack, and no rachni had shown up. So we took our vehicles to their location, 7 clicks away.

The hive was still devoid of any signs of life, the seemingly primitive tunnels hid airbases and barracks though. They fought without armor or weapons, but they had advanced technologies and powerful spacecraft. After examining the area and patrolling the various enterances and exits, we finally determined it was safe to enter.

The tunnel lock openned to the barrel of my shotgun, and I led my men forward. Our weapons were drawn, and we began to explore their caverns. The tunnels seemed uncharacteristically shallow, and empty. It was hard to believe that any amount of rachni could live here. Something was wrong. Then I found it.

It happenned to be a hole, about two meters in diameter, that seemed to drop straight down into another level.

"Men," I said, "Who wants to go spelunking?"

The soldiers saw the enterance, and the vulnerability it had while being used, and no one answered. Vyk fiddled with his sniper rifle's ammo loading mechanism.

"Vyk, you take point," I said. The young krogan looked at me, not with surprise, or even fear, but resignation. I was already making progress. "And put that rifle away. You're not going to be using it in here."

The soldier bleakly but obediently placed it in the shoulder holster and drew his pistol. He looked at me, almost expectantly, then dropped in the hole. One by one, we followed suit. Once we were all down on the lower floor, our plans were shattered. The hole above us proved to be a thick door, which immediately shut on us and trapped us in below.

I listened intently, the flashlight on my armor quickly scanned around me, as I realized we were not alone. Two soldiers began to vocally speculate what was going on, who I immediately silenced. There was this dull roar of movement, but coming from above.

I looked up, and saw hundreds of explosive rachni workers clinging to the celing. Destructive on their own, together...

"Move!" I shouted, racing away from the horrible creatures and beckoning my men to follow. A few caught up to me in time. I didn't see what happened to the rest, but I heard the explosion and felt the shock wave as I realized that almost my entire force was killed by my neglect of a simple rule of war. Never enter an unsecured structure in the middle of a firefight.

A/N Ooh... Cliffhanger. I finally got the motivation to get cracking on this story again, but its hard to try to stay true to the game and create a realistic world at the same time.


End file.
